I can't believe it didn't occur to me that a subreddit like this might have existed. Holy shit, I have so much to get off my chest. I'm sorry in advance for what will probably end up being a wall of text.

I have very mixed feelings about dogs. For the most part I hate them, and most people seem to understand once I explain why. But sometimes if I put the consequences of shitty ownership aside and just look at dogs for what they are without that, I can kind of warm up to them a bit. However, I am very on the fence as to whether I would ever want a dog of my own, and the majority of the time I err on the side of "no."

I also tend to feel guilty about hating dogs, because I know everybody likes them and people will look at me as weird for not liking them. But goddammit, I have a reason to hate them. Anyone would hate them if they had to put up with the same shit I've been dealing with basically all my life.

I live with my mother and our roommate. (This saves me from paying for a dorm.) My mother has two small dogs: a Yorkshire terrier and a dachshund. I cannot stand them, and I am frequently amazed by the level of denial and/or laziness she must be operating under to continue keeping them in the house.

Why I hate her dogs:

She hasn't lifted a finger to train them in the years she's had them, so as a result they have absolutely awful behavior that everyone just politely ignores.

They have never been crate-trained or taught not to bark, and she and our roommate both work. So these stupid things are left home alone for 8-10 hours a day. They bark at everything. Usually it's when somebody walks past our house. And they make the most unholy fucking racket when my mother or our roommate get home from work, this cacophony of barking, whining, yelping, and sometimes howling.

Related to the above: The summer after I graduated high school, my mother finally got a job after spending god-knows-how-long in the house. Things were quiet until then. Guess how I found out she left for work at 7:30 (and later 10:30)? I would get woken up every morning by yapping and so, so much howling. And it being summer, it wasn't like I wanted to sleep in or anything. (/s) When we were packing up ~2 years ago to move to the other side of [town we live in] and my friend found out as he was helping me, he gave me a pair of earplugs because he said I shouldn't be having my sleep interrupted. I have been using earplugs to sleep since.

They are not housetrained. Yes, you read that right. They have never been taught to shit outside. They freely piss and shit all over the downstairs carpets, and she just picks it up and throws it out/flushes it. The carpets are stained with shit. It looks fucking disgusting. I frequently spot piles of shit on the floor, which I refuse to pick up because her lack of responsibility for her animals and shitty choices are not my problem. Her dogs, her mess, she can deal with it. This particular thing is probably the reason I hate dogs so much. Years of living with her and her dogs have twisted my perception and now dogs are filthy, disgusting creatures. And it boggles my mind how little she cares. She sees the shit stains on the floors every day, picks shit up constantly, and doesn't even seem to think there's anything wrong with it. She doesn't care that we live in filth. The first floor of our house literally reeks of piss. Drives me up the fucking wall.

The second floor of the house (where my bedroom is) would have ended up the same way. After finding dog shit upstairs (but thankfully not in my room) three times, I lost my patience and there is now a baby gate at the top of the stairs so those things can't defile my nice clean living space anymore. But because of how fucking filthy the downstairs is, I make sure to never leave my room without some form of shoe on. I even bought my boyfriend a pair of sandals so he doesn't get his feet gross either. It's ridiculous how much I have to work around these fucking things, honestly.

Most of these problems are a direct result of my mom's terrible ownership, but are things that the dogs themselves do. She is a whole other story.

Not only does she not bother to train her dogs, she feeds them off her own plate constantly. I'm not even sure they eat dog food anymore. As a result, the dachshund is now grossly obese. I swear that thing must weigh 20 pounds and yet she still feeds it human food and will even pick the thing up and carry/hold it sometimes. It's probably abuse, honestly, they do not get the nutrition they need as evidenced by the runny, wet shit piles that I sometimes find.

She doesn't seem to care that they make our house filthy. It's either laziness or denial, or the more horrifying alternative: maybe she knows it's bad but "doesn't have the time" to train them and can't get rid of them because they're her ~precious babies~ and she ~loves~ them so much. Barf. What really drives me insane about this is that she knows full fucking well how miserable they make me, and yet she still keeps them in the house. It's fucking enraging and really makes me think she cares more about her fucking dogs than her own daughter.

When we were getting ready to move over to this side of town, I asked her if we could not take the dogs with us because I wanted our new house to actually be fucking clean. Her response? To get all teary-eyed and tell me that they were actually housetrained, we just couldn't let them out in the winter because it hurts them, then follow that up with "when we move we'll get them trained," which of course never fucking happened. My mother is the most unreliable person on the planet and has a track record of never doing a single thing she claims she will do, plus this "getting them trained" nonsense was probably an empty promise to get me to shut up about taking her precious babies away from her. I didn't know how to deal with her crying, so I just dropped the subject. Two years later and oh look at that, our new house is about as filthy as our old one was.

I cannot fucking wait to move out of her house and away from her filthy fucking animals. After having dogs in the house since I was about 5, I don't think I ever want to live with a dog again, most times. They're underfoot all the time, I don't want to be followed constantly or have my attention demanded, and I don't ever want to see dog shit on a floor ever again. I fantasize about having a nice, pristine carpet I can actually walk on in an apartment/house that doesn't stink of piss.

You know what the sad part is? I actually used to like dogs. I had one of my own as a child that I really liked, but he wasn't around very long until my parents gave him away because suddenly, the dog a family member had rescued from an abusive situation was more important. They were both males and therefore peed everywhere (territory marking?), so what did my parents do? Rather than pass the abused dog on to a shelter like reasonable people, they got rid of the one that they actually paid for in favor of this fucking rescue. They got rid of the only dog I'd ever liked, and sometimes I still get sad about it years later.

But I guess that doesn't matter. With how my mom raises dogs, I would have lost any good opinions on them anyways.

Sorry for the huge fucking rant. Years worth of dog-hate tends to build up and I guess every so often I need to get it out of my system.